Being involved in such a revolution was the stuff of dreams

Nelson Mandela has always had a special place in my heart. As a white teenager growing up in 1960s apartheid South Africa, I remember my sense of guilt whenever I was on the beach at Seapoint, Cape Town, knowing Mandela was locked away in harsh conditions on Robben Island only a few miles away. I grew up believing South Africa would never be free – at least not in my lifetime. I returned in 1993-94 in the run-up to the first democratic elections, as the only British member of an ecumenical monitoring team drawn from all over the world. Mandela had been released and I and others were there to play a small part in the extraordinary peaceful revolution that he made possible – it was the stuff of dreams.Vivienne BartonBrighton

• On his state visit to London in July 1996, Mandela came to Westminster Abbey to lay a wreath at the grave of the Unknown Warrior. My wife and I and other members of the abbey family had been invited by the dean, Michael Mayne, to meet him. The Abbey had been warned that Mandela was running late and could only spend a few minutes there. Not so. The choir sang for him, and he shook hands with all 22 of them and with everyone else including Betty and me. The dean took him on a tour, and he wanted to see everything and know about everything. Eleven years later, I watched from the abbey's north door as his 9ft bronze statue, sculpted by Ian Walters, was unveiled in Parliament Square by Gordon Brown, as a frail Mandela, supported by his wife and a walking stick, looked on.Chris BirchLondon

• My friend is a retired Methodist missionary who served in South Africa. She answered her phone one evening to find Nelson Mandela on the line. He was calling from Buckingham Palace, during a state visit, to thank her for visiting him in prison on Robben Island. Your readers may be moved, as I was, by his gratitude and humility.Rev Canon John YoungYork

• In all the coverage of Mandela's passing, it is worth mentioning that FW de Klerk's announcement on 2 February 1990 of the unbanning of the ANC, and the release of Mandela, came almost exactly 30 years after Harold Macmillan's "wind of change" speech in Cape Town on 3 February 1960. The irony of the coincidence of course was that while Macmillan was outlining his radical vision of a rapid decolonisation of British possessions further up the African continent, the moral of his message was lost on his hosts and did not reach Pretoria from Cape Town until three decades later. Ramnik ShahEpsom, Surrey

Alf Kumalo chronicled the Mandela family for 60 years, photographing the children as they were growing up and the man himself after his release. David Smith met the photojournalist before his death in 2012